Made in China, been in Norway. Part 2 My Grandmother Drank from China

Anne Helen Mydland: 

When I was a child, my grandmother would take me to the cabinet where the fine porcelain was kept. This happened when we were going to have visitors, and then she would say: You know Anne, this is from China. And so I understood that Chinese porcelain was something special. 

Narrator: 

But as she stood there with her grandmother, little Anne Helen Mydland couldn't have known that many years later, she would smash this porcelain and bury it on the other side of the world.  

Anne Helen Mydland: 

As a child, I knew that our Chinese porcelain was among our finest and most valuable possessions. But as an adult, I learned that this mass-produced Chinese porcelain from the late nineteen-sixties and early seventies, wasn't really worth anything. In fact, it was an example of bad taste. 

Narrator: 

When she grew up, Anne Helen Mydland studied archaeology and ceramics and learned how porcelain – sometimes known as white gold – became an extremely valuable trading commodity that changed the world.  

Anne Helen Mydland: 

Ever since I was a child, I've been fascinated by how porcelain can pass on memories and culture. It's a material that gets broken, it's fragile, but it's through ceramics that we define cultures that are thousands of years old. It outlives all of us. 

In 2004, I travelled to Jingdezhen in China. I had been invited to attend the thousandth anniversary of the start of Chinese porcelain production. And for that occasion, I developed a project that involved smashing my family porcelain. I marked it with a new stamp that read "Made in China. Been in Norway. 2004" and I took it all back with me to China. 

There I laid out all these fragments. These shards returned to the soil of China, they came home, and who knows – perhaps precisely these shards will be dug up in another thousand years and tell their story. 

Narrator: 
You can go further into this story today by looking at all the pictures and reading more in the red notebooks hanging on the wall.